Botham, Richards and Garner’s dramatic Somerset exit: the inside story

Shockwaves were felt across Somerset at the end of the 1986 season when the club announced that their overseas players, Viv Richards and Joel Garner, would be replaced by Martin Crowe, with the inevitable consequence of Ian Botham’s departure.

Somerset had finished 16th in the championship and there was a critical loss to Lancashire in the second round of the NatWest Trophy in July. Defeat in that competition at that stage of the season condemned a county side, which was struggling in the other competitions, to another trophy-less season. That was always when the mumbling started in the committee rooms.

This was the summer when Ian was banned from the game for two months after admitting that he had smoked pot earlier in his career. The response of his relatively new and ill-conceived choice as manager, Tim Hudson, to Ian’s admission, which was revealed on the front pages of the Mail on Sunday after a deal had been brokered between the two parties, raised the odd eyebrow. “Doesn’t everybody?” said a bemused Hudson.

Ian’s manager was a charmer but not the ideal man to be running his business affairs in the mid-80s – or in any other decade. The notion of a career in Hollywood, promoted by Hudson, never quite came to pass though Ian did appear in pantomime half a dozen years later.

Ian’s enforced absence from first-class cricket meant that he was obliged to play in Somerset’s second team to get some practice for the first time in more than a decade. Julian Wyatt was leading the team at the time and he was asked how tricky it was to captain Botham. “It was very simple, actually,” he replied. “Ian told me when he wanted to bat and he told me when he wanted to bowl.” (For the record Ian scored 41 and took two for 47 from his 15